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I would say that all these alternative goals you mentioned can be classified as preparing.

• riazrizvi 7y ago
  (Over) Preparing in the context of war or business is where you keep working without engaging the enemy or the customer. The classic problem in startups, which i’ve been through myself, is where you keep working on making your product without developing your market. If you are doing sales interviews in a startup without a product yet, then you are engaging with the customer, and by coordinating with your product team, you will reduce the problem of over building the product. You need to partition the problem space (the goal space, the overall objective space) in terms of the separate essential pieces that need to be accomplished, once you have this partition of endeavors, then you start making progress in each channel. Over-Preparing is not defined (IMO) as a problem of inadequate rate of progress, rather it is that you can never succeed with your activities because you are not making any progress in a critical channel, and this weirdly magnifies the perceived difficulty of the missing piece, leading to more and more effort in the other channels. A bit like France overbuilding their defenses with the Maginot line when instead aggressive military action in some theater of war before WWII would have exposed the extreme inadequacy of their tank and soldier communication methods. I feel like this would be a lot easier to explain by phone. My email is riazrizvi at gmail, if you want to set that up. I’m on Pacific Standard. Open invite to anyone.